Procurement’s strategic impact in action

Industry blogs and conference headliners are abuzz with the discussion of procurement’s strategic impact. It’s clear that procurement is gaining more recognition as key value driver and earning a seat at the decision-making table. However, many teams are struggling to meet this potential, buried under the day-to-day administrative demands of managing a manual competitive bidding and RFx process.

Procurement software can help teams bridge this disconnect, by streamlining and automating many of the time-consuming tasks that make up a manual process. Modern platforms take the effort out of receiving and distributing bids, and managing the evaluation process.

The result? Major efficiency gains and increased capacity to take on high-performance work — the kind that allows procurement teams to realize a strategic role in their organizations.

In our daily conversations with clients, we encounter countless examples of teams doing just that. Here, we highlight three leaders who have digitized their procurement process and invested the resulting time savings to make a strategic impact in their organizations:

Deeper collaboration with stakeholders

Lori Letourneau is the Director of the CEA FRANCOachat, a shared service organization managing the procurement for five French-language school boards in Ontario. The CEA FRANCOachat transitioned to a 100% digital procurement process to unlock greater efficiency and data accuracy.

As a result, the team has been able to dedicate more time towards collaborating with clients to drive greater value.

“The digitization of procurement allowed our team to focus on the needs of our stakeholders. We create value by engaging our customers through technology and have become active participants in specification development and contractual discussions.” – Lori Letourneau

Innovative procurement methods

Lili Chen is the Manager of the Procurement Management Office at University Health Network, the largest healthcare and medical research organization of its kind in North America. As a result of bringing their procurement process online, their team is able to work more efficiently and take on more projects.

However, the greatest value has been their increased capacity to investigate and implement procurement methods beyond the typical Contract A/Contract B procurement process.

“At UHN, we have been so fortunate in going into different types of procurement: non-binding RFPs, competitive dialogue, and so on. We are at the forefront of some of these really neat strategies for procuring what we need in a different way. That, to me, is the value that has been brought to the table for us.” -Lili Chen

Organization-wide impact

Tracey Ens, Director of Procurement Services at Wilfrid Laurier University, arrived in her role with a mandate to change the reputation of the outdated procurement department. One of the first steps she took was to implement Bonfire to streamline their RFx and competitive bidding process online.

The digitization of their procurement helped to brand the department as an innovator and gave them the capacity to expand their impact across the organization. Their expertise has been called upon for various decisions outside the scope of the usual procurement process — other departments have even seen the value of using Bonfire’s evaluation capabilities to conduct program reviews and employee recognition award decisions.

“It’s given us the ability to get involved in things that aren’t necessarily procurement related on campus as well. We are seen more as a strategic department than we were seven years ago. We are brought into things just for our business expertise, as opposed just for procurement. It’s a real growth opportunity for the department to have us involved in those things.” -Tracey Ens